Category Archives: Preserves

Sweet Mincemeat is so easy to make and so much tastier than the ready made that I don’t understand why anyone would not make their own. Also when you make your own you can control the amount of sugar in it. I find most commercial food products that are sweet have increased the proportion of sugar over the last few years.

I am a great believer in using either what you have or can get hold of locally. Frequently this can point you in the direction of improving on an original recipe, as is the case here. The limes giving the mincemeat a fresher and slightly more acid citrus zing than the lemons that are normally used.

I only have one small quince tree, but it works incredibly hard and produces 40 to 50 fruit per year, some weighing as much as 800 grams. They made fabulous quince jelly, and using an old recipe where the fruit is sweetened with raisins and flavoured with orange peel, Mermelada. This being the Portugese name for quince and the recipe being the forerunner of the marmalade we know today.

Still there were plenty of Quince left for other things. Being of the same family as apples, surely I thought, they could be substituted for them in any preserve recipes? And of course I am always looking for new ways of using my limes…..

Firstly find yourself a container big enough to comfortably take all of the above.

For the limes, having a lime farm, I am able to wait until my limes are fully ripe quite yellow and sweeter than the hard green ones generally available. If when buying your limes some of them are more yellow than others, go for those as they are sweeter. If you can find unwaxed ones so much the better.

Wash them then put them in a pan with just enough water to cover and bring slowly to the boil. Simmer for an hour until tender.

Drain the limes and let them cool. Halve them and remove any pips. Put them in the food processor and process them into a coarse pulp. Put the pulp in your container.

Next the quince. Peel and core the quince and grate them. I use the grater on the food processor for this as well. Quince are so hard that grating by hand would be a bit onerous.

Immediately add to the limes and mix well. Add the brandy and the sugar and mix again. This will stop the grated quince from going brown.

For the suet I prefer to use fresh beef suet. Although the trimming and chopping of the suet adds more work to the recipe I find the end result lighter than using prepared packet suet.

If you are using fresh suet, trim off any sinewy or bloody bits, then chop the suet finely.

Mix the suet and then the currants and raisins into the lime and quince mix.

For the candied orange and clementine, I like to make my own. Not because I have orange and clementine growing on the farm, but because home made candied peel has much more zing than most that you buy. It is not difficult to do.

Take the peel off some washed oranges with a potato peeler, until you have 50 grams. Chop it into strips or squares and put it into a small saucepan.
Wash and peel some clementine until you have 50 grams of peel. Again chop into strips or squares. Add to the orange in the pan.
Add enough juice from the oranges to just cover the peel. Add 150 grams sugar. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes until the peel is brightly coloured and the liquid reduced.

Add the above peel and its juice to the mincemeat mix and stir well to amalgamate.

Pack the mincemeat into clean and sterilised jars. Seal.

The mincemeat will look quite pale to begin with, but will darken as it matures. I like to make the mincemeat one year and then use it the next, although in recent years I haven’t managed that as it is so good that it all gets snapped up by friends and family.

When you grow aubergines the first year plants will start to give you fruit in June or July and then continue until about November or early December depending on the weather. You can take out the plants at this point and start again the next year, but with the frost free winters here I can leave mine in the ground. They will have a little rest for a month or two and then start to produce fruit again. The fruits tend to be smaller and paler than the summer fruit, but plentiful.

When there are more than I can eat fresh, I like to cook them in this spicy sauce and bottle them for serving as part of a mixed starter later. Escabeche is a method used a lot here in Spain for preserving usually fish. It is highly flavoured with garlic and smoked paprika, and then vinegar and white wine are used to aid the preserving process.

For a slightly more eastern mood to the escabeche for preserving aubergines I like to add some cumin seeds and use quite a hot piquant paprika.

500 grams small aubergines

1 head garlic

150 ml olive oil

150 ml white wine

150 ml white wine vinegar

15 ml cumin seeds

30 ml smoked paprika – picante

Salt

To cook the preserve you will need a large shallow thick based pan in which you can cook the aubergines in one layer.

Divide the head of garlic into cloves and peel each one. If some are very large slice them in half.

Wash the aubergines and remove the stalks. Cut the fruits in half from top to bottom.

Heat the oil in the pan and add the garlic.

Once the garlics start to sizzle turn them over and move them to the edges of the pan.

Add the aubergines cut side down and fry gently for 5 to 10 minutes until golden brown.

Turn over and fry on the other side.

Add the cumin seeds and paprika, then the vinegar and wine. Shake the pan to mix the spices and liquid without disturbing the aubergine pieces.

Add enough water to just cover the aubergines and season with salt, half a teaspoon.

Cook covered for 5 minutes.

Gently turn over each of the aubergines, I use tongs for this, and continue cooking covered until the aubergines are cooked through but not mushy. This should take between 5 and 10 minutes.

Some of the liquid will by now have been absorbed by the aubergines and so will look reduced.

Put the aubergines while still hot in hot sterilised jars, seal them and cool.

Serve as either part of a mixed starter, with cheese or they are very good with lamb dishes.

There are two slightly different ways of making this. One method, you leave the tomatoes whole, skin them and then make them into the passata and jar the passata straight away. The other method you chop the tomatoes without skinning them, make them into the passata, put the pulp through a mouli, re-heat the passata and then put it into jars.

Each method has its advantages. For the first you obviously don’t need a mouli, and you get a much chunkier texture. I tend to use this method when I have a garden full of perfectly formed but small tomatoes.

The second method is good for when your home grown tomatoes are a little less than perfect. Maybe they have a tad of blossom end rot or woody centres but most of the tomato is OK. Because you cut up the tomatoes you can use the good bits and send the rest to the compost heap, thus not wasting any of your crop. Also this method despite having to re-heat the pulp is actually quicker than the first method with all the tomato peeling. Another plus to this method is that you can mix in other vegetables. Although the recipe below is for tomatoes alone, when I made the batch in the photos, I had some courgettes that had raced off and were aspiring to be marrows, so they were peeled and chopped and added to the mix. Red peppers work very well, but not green as they are too bitter. Onions, all types of squashes, auberines. All add thier own flavours. I would never go more than one third of the other vegetables to two thirds tomatoes.

Before I get into the recipe a note about jars. I keep all jars that have the type of lids that create a vacuum and have a plastic seal around the inside of the lid. These can be re-used as long as they will still fasten tight. The lids must not be pierced, rusty or bent round the edges or they will not seal and create a vacuum. When you come to use them for preserving the passata they need to be hot and sterile. I find that a hot wash in the dishwasher with a steam dry works really well. You need to be ready to use the jars straight from the dishwasher when they are pretty well too hot to handle.

Alternatively, if the jars are already clean, put them with thier lids a few at a time in a large pan with boiling water and heat to a simmer to sterilize them. Fish them out, drain them and use while still hot.

For 1 kilo of tomatoes

2 or 3 cloves of garlic – finely chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 bayleaf

pinch of sugar

salt and pepper

Firstly prepare the tomatoes. If you are doing the first version peel the tomatoes by bringing a pan of water to the boil. When it is boiling add a few of the tomatoes. You don’t want to lower the temperature of the water by adding too many. As soon as you see the skins of the tomatoes start to split, which will only take a couple of minutes, scoop them out and let them cool. Carry on with the rest of the tomatoes. When the tomatoes are cool, slip the skins off.

If you are going for the second method, just cut up the tomatoes. Remember to weigh them after cutting if there is a lot of waste.

In a pan large enough to take all the tomatoes, heat the oil gently. Add the garlic and cook a minute or two. Add the tomatoes, bayleaf and seasonings. Stir to mix. Cover and leave to stew on a low heat for about half an hour.

If you are with method one, taste the passata to check the seasonings and adjust accordingly. Then put in hot jars filling to half a centimetre from the top. Make sure that there are no bits of sauce around the top where the glass will meet the seal in the lid. You can just wipe the top with kitchen roll. To begin with put the lids on loosely, the passata will then warm the lid a bit more. After a couple of minutes you can tighten them up.

If you are on method two, put the pulp through the mouli using the coarsest disc, this will sieve out the pips as well as the skin. Return the pulp to the pan and bring back to the boil. Lower the heat and simmer for three minutes to kill any bacteria that may have infiltrated the pulp. Then continue as above adjusting the seasoning and jarring up the passata.

The herbs in the passata can be changed as you like. Instead of the bayleaf, try fresh basil or oregano.

Waste is one of the biggest crimes of modern times, and particularly food waste. When you have gone to all the trouble of digging, manuring, digging again, then sowing and watering your own vegetables, and nurturing them into maturity, then the last thing you want to do is waste any of them.

No matter how well you plan to grow the amounts of produce that you actually need, there will always be moments when there are surpluses. This method of preserving deals very well with small surpluses. When I started developing these recipes I had an idea in my head of the use I wanted for the resulting preserve. I wanted cooked vegetables that I could use as either salads as part of a mixed starter, or as the topping for crostini or pizzas, or as the base for a pasta sauce. I love those cooked vegetable salads that the Italians serve as part of antipasti. They are cooked al dente retaining a bit of firmness, and are well flavoured with lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and often herbs. Once you get your head around the basic principles of this preservation method and the flavouring you will be able to make your own combinations of ingredients.

Essential equipment for these recipes are jars. I find that as these salads are quite rich containing a large proportion of olive oil I don’t want to use a large amount at once, so save any small jars that come into the house. They need to have a screw top and plastic seal as so many modern jars do. They need to be scrupulously clean and then need sterilizing in a water bath just before use. Don’t be put off by the terminology, they just need to be put in a pan of boiling water with their lids and held there for five minutes.

I am going to start with Aubergine and Red Pepper Salad as this is one of the ingredients that I used in making Mini Chicken Pstilla which is the recipe that I was going to share with you today until I realised that it would be better to give you the salad first. The Pstilla recipe will follow I promise.

AUBERGINE AND RED PEPPER SALAD

4 aubergines

4 red peppers

6 large cloves of sweet garlic

300 ml olive oil

large sprig of fresh oregano

lemon juice

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Peel and coarsely chop the garlic.

Cut the red pepper into small dice.

Get the pan with the jars and lids on to warm. If you haven’t a pan big enough to take them all, start with as many jars as the pan will take and then you can add more once these are used. Don’t worry if they are ready too soon for the salad, you can always turn off the heat for a while and then reboil when needed.

In a pan large enough to take all the ingredients heat the olive oil slowly on a low heat. When it is warm add the garlic and peppers. Stir to cover with oil.

Cut the aubergines into dice about a centimetre square. Add to the pan. You don’t want to cut the aubergines in advance as they have a tendency to discolour and go brown. Stir to mix in.

Season with a good couple of pinches of salt and the chopped oregano leaves and stir again. Cook slowly for about ten minutes.

We are now getting to the tricky part, which is the amount of cooking. If you don’t cook the vegetables enough, they will ferment in the jar, too much cooking and you have a mush. It is a bit trial and error I am afraid. Start to check how cooked the salad is and add lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

As soon as the salad is cooked turn off the heat. Drain the jars from the water and fill with the salad while the jars are still hot. Asbestos fingers are a help here. The salad wants to come to about half a centimetre from the top of the jar. Make sure that the rim of the jar is clean, so that you have a good tight seal, before putting on the hot lids. Put the lids on loosely for a minute or two and then tighten up.

Leave to cool totally before washing the jars and labelling. I always check that the jars are well sealed at this point. If the lids have a nipple in the middle you should have heard this ping as the jars were cooling and it should be concave and pulled in. If there is no nipple the lids should still be slightly concave and tight looking. If they are not then use these jars straight away.

Variations

Courgette Salad – I made this after returning from a short trip to find that my courgettes had turned into mini-marrows while I was away. Courgettes, peeled and diced, onion chopped small, garlic as above and a couple of peeled and chopped tomatoes. Follow the master recipe above for the method.

Red Pepper Salad – Strips of red peppers slowly stewed in olive oil to just cover and seasoned with salt and lemon juice. Don’t worry about the amount of oil, when you come to use the salad drain off the oil and use it for cooking or salad dressings later.

Artichoke Salad – As you clean and prepare the artichokes put them into water to which a good proportion of lemon juice has been added so that they do not discolour. Drain and stew in olive oil to cover. Season with salt – the lemon is already added.